“The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have.” -- Henry David Thoreau

About Me

Editor for publishing company by day; skald in the Hall of Fire by night; and member of the S.H.I.E.L.D.W.A.L.L.
Essayist and reviewer for numerous web and print-based fantasy publications, including The Cimmerian, Black Gate, Mythprint, REH: Two-Gun Raconteur, The Dark Man, and SFFaudio.com.

Friday, March 30, 2012

In an effort to get more heavy metal on this blog--because why would anyone possibly want less metal--I'm hereby starting a "Metal Friday" feature. This will consist of Youtube clips of some of my favorite songs, sometimes with commentary when the Muse strikes me.

Today, "Valkyries" by Blind Guardian, from the album At the Edge of Time. It's a magnificent lyrical/aural evocation of those mythical choosers of the slain, bearing the bravest with them on their ride to Valhalla. Turn it up loud:

Thursday, March 29, 2012

What do you want out of your fantasy? Mythmaking in the mold of JRR Tolkien’s
The Silmarillion? Freebooting adventure, decaying
civilizations, and heroic swordplay a-la Robert E. Howard? Weird, extraplanar
demonic horrors like those encountered in the fiction of HP Lovecraft or Clark
Ashton Smith? You get all of this stuff in John Fultz’ gonzo debut novel
Seven Princes, both to our benefit and occasionally our
detriment.

Seven Princes is bold, brash, and big. This is a novel
written with bright strokes of character and setting, bursting with
world-shaking adventure, intrigue, and conflict. It reads big, and feels big,
and it’s unrepentantly so. In a “Meet the Author” Q&A at the back of the
book Fultz describes the influences and raw materials that underlie
Seven Princes. These are legion—Lord Dunsany, Howard,
Lovecraft, Smith, Tolkien, Tanith Lee, Darrell Schweitzer, and others—so it’s no
surprise Seven Princes contains multitudes. But underneath it
all is a strong epic fantasy undercurrent, shot through with swords and sorcery.
Says Fultz:

A writer’s sensibility is, I think, determined largely by his or her
influences… what you’ve read most and where your passions lie. You write what
you love. That said, writers like to stretch themselves too. For me, the whole
epic/heroic fantasy realm is where I’ve been heading since I began reading
fantasy as a kid in the late 1970s. Some have also called my work “sword and
sorcery” but nobody can give a solid definition of what that actually is. For
me, the bottom line is that I just Do My Thing and let my passion for
storytelling lead me where I need to go.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

I recently agreed to review the audio book of Donald Westlake's The Hook for SFFaudio.com. It's a mystery/suspense novel, I believe the first I've ever read. The Hook was fun and Westlake is a good writer, though my opinion of it was not enough to prompt a rash of mystery titles reviewed here. But it's good to read outside your preferred genre and see how the other half lives from time to time.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

I’m troubled, deeply troubled, by the extremes of existentialist,
postmodern thought. The kind that gets put under the microscope in John
Gardner’s fine little 1971 novel Grendel.

If the Dragon is right, Grendel cannot be morally condemned,
and his actions are no better or worse than Beowulf’s, or anyone else’s. They
are, like everything else, absolutely meaningless. The Dragon is the real horror
of Grendel—a beast that adheres to hard,
cold materialism. “It’s all the same in the end, matter and motion, simple or
complex. No difference, finally. Death, transfiguration. Ashes to ashes and
slime to slime, amen,” says the Dragon to Grendel. Nothingness awaits us at the
end. The dragon’s speech is like Morgoth’s to Hurin; negating meaning, negating
the possibility of a benevolent God, negating even an uncaring but eternal
creative force in the universe. Certainly negating an afterlife or any
possibility of escape.

Compare the conversation of Hurin/Morgoth in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Children of Hurin:

“Beyond the Circles of the World you shall not pursue
those who refuse you.”

“Beyond the Circles of the World I will not pursue them,” said Morgoth.
“For beyond the Circles of the World there is Nothing. But within them they
shall not escape me, until they enter into Nothing.”

…to Grendel/the Dragon:

“Nevertheless, something will come of all this,” I said.

“Nothing,” he said. “A brief pulsation in the black hole of eternity.”

We are just a cog in the wheel, part of the mindless
machine. The Dragon recommends coping with this state by hoarding wealth and
sitting upon it.

Postmodern thought of this sort has no clothes; we need a moral compass.

If you're a fan of the film I recommend reading the linked article above. Evil Dead 2 is much better than the original, and I think it's better than Army of Darkness. The latter is a great film, too, and perhaps a bigger cult favorite with its higher memorable quote quotient, but this bit from the article sums up why I prefer Dead by Dawn over AoD (by a hair):

Army of Darkness has more than its share of fanatics, given that it provided
many with their access point to the Evil Dead universe, but for me it’s never
quite measured up to its predecessors. By taking the action out of the cabin and
into a much larger-scale, higher-production value setting, it lacks that DIY
charm, and the oddball humour sits awkwardly with the concessions made to a
fairly standard studio blockbuster format; it doesn’t help that the horror
elements are significantly pared back. Worse still is how Ash’s characterisation
changes between the films. Far from the witless but well-meaning would-be tough
guy of Evil Dead 2, in Army of Darkness he’s a mean-spirited, arrogant bastard
with whom it’s very hard to empathise. Sure, Army of Darkness provides Ash with
many of his most celebrated one-liners – the immortal “Gimme some sugar, baby,”
and “This is my boom-stick!” amongst others – but none of them quite measure up
to that single, immortal word that is evoked for the first time in Evil Dead 2…
“Groovy.”

For further reading, my own take on how I discovered the greatness of Evil Dead 2. Just like the writer of the article above I was hooked after the possessed hand sequence. My favorite part: When Ash slams a bucket over his sawed off appendage, then weights it down with a copy of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Just indescribably awesome.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

“Who cares who’s
buried where?” muttered Craw, thinking about all the men he’d seen buried.
“Once a man’s in the ground he’s just mud. Mud and stories. And the stories and
the men don’t often have much in common.”

—Joe Abercrombie, The
Heroes

Although it’s classified as fantasy, don’t be fooled: Joe
Abercrombie’s The Heroes is every
inch a war story, knee deep in mud and blood, with the term “heroes” used in a rather
ironic fashion. You won’t find any heroes here, just a bunch of men trying to
live through another day on the battlefield.

It’s also bloody good. While it’s not at the level of the
Pulitzer Prize-winning The Killer
Angels, and perhaps doesn’t quite stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the same shieldwall
as Steven Pressfield’s brilliant Gates
of Fire, The Heroes is certainly one of the best books of its kind. Chock
full of vivid combat and the incredible stress and strain of war, with a cast
of memorable if not particularly deep characters and enough twists to keep you
guessing to the end, it’s a terrific read for those who enjoy the sights and
sounds of combat on the printed page.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

You gotta laugh—or maybe weep—at hardcore nerds in frothing nerdrage with an over-inflated sense of their own creative abilities. The
types who swear with a solemn face that Tolkien should have dropped books 2 and
4 of The Lord of the Rings, tightened
up all those boring travel-y bits in book 6, leavened it with a liberal dose of
combat carnage, and viola! The Lord of
the Rings is 10x better than that crappy book sitting on your shelf.

The latest example comes courtesy of message board
discussions of The Walking Dead. I’m
not naming the board(s) in question to protect the guilty parties (e-mail me if
you want the hard evidence), but really, when you’ve got (according to their
avatar pictures) middle-aged men stating in non-ironic fashion that they could
out-write the writers of The Walking Dead,
no problem and for sure, then you follow their blog link back and find grade-school
caliber fiction so bad it makes your eyes water … yeah. Hard to take these
critics seriously. But it doesn’t stop them from wanting the rest of us to hear the truth about why this show sucks so bad.

Friday, March 9, 2012

More than 30 years ago in the introduction to Strange Wine (1978) Harlan Ellison
railed against television, declaring it the death knell of books and reading. In
his usual blunt style:

I now believe that television
itself, the medium of sitting in front of a magic box that pulses images at us
endlessly, the act of watching TV, per se, is mind crushing. It is soul
deadening, dehumanizing, soporific in a poisonous way, ultimately brutalizing.
It is, simply put so you cannot mistake my meaning, a bad thing.

It’s hard to say whether Ellison’s fears were misplaced or
have come to fruition. I’ve seen reports from the National Endowment for the Arts
declaring that reading is in crisis and Americans are reading both less, and
less well; opposing reports state that books like Harry Potter have revived reading in old and young alike, and that
e-readers have made reading cool again, opening up an old pastime with new
technology.

Perhaps Ellison’s essay is showing a little age. Television
sets—the glass teat, as he once famously described them—are now competing with
computer screens for our national attention, and computers of course allow us
to both passively consume entertainment like TV while granting us more access
to information and an enormous variety of reading material, albeit of variable
quality. Worth noting too is the fact that Ellison was writing in an age of The
Mary Tyler Moore Show and Bewitched; perhaps TV has gotten better since then (then
I think of The Bachelor and Fear Factor and wonder if gladiatorial combats
aren’t coming next). But I think there’s a kernel of truth to Ellison’s rant
about television: I wonder if there isn’t something being lost with the decline
of paper books, which promote the act of sustained reading without ready access
to an internet browser.

Saturday, March 3, 2012

I’ve had pretty good results in my ongoing quest to track
down and read those acknowledged fantasy classics that I’ve considered holes in my
repertoire. George MacDonald’s Phantastes was worth the effort, a curious but
powerful and interesting tale. Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny I found to be a
book of great ideas, if lacking slightly in execution. The Worm Ouroboros
proved to be one of my all-time favorites. And so on.

Alas, that streak came to a halt with Fletcher Pratt’s The
Well of the Unicorn. I was turned on to this 1948 novel by L. Sprague de Camp,
who devoted a chapter to Pratt in his heroic fantasy assessment Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers. I got through The Well, but I
found it to be a very hard slog. Pratt’s writing style is, to be honest, awkward and
artless. I often found myself reading a page with my eyes glazed over and
realized that nothing had sunk in. Sometimes I would go back and re-read but
other times I couldn’t be bothered and plowed on, hoping to pick up the lost thread
of the story.

What are some of the problems? Bizarre shifts in tenses.
Dialogue introduced with either traditional quotation marks, or en-dashes.
Run-on sentences. Multiple dialects that require effort to parse through what is being said. In general, dense, heavy writing.
Paragraphs like this are very typical:

“To the central square!” said
Rogai, and “Where do you think I go?” Airar. There stands the statue of King
Argimenes with the old sword lifted from under the plough. At this place lights
and people began to flow in, half unbelieving that Dalecarle revolters were in
the town, curious that this might be some trick of the red triangle. A fire was
lighted; when men saw by the banners that trick there was none, they began to
come out in earnest, some with hidden, forbidden weapons, to caper around the
blaze, handshaking with strangers, singing warsongs almost forgot:

Note the bizarre attribution (I believe Airar was the one
who said “Where do you think I go,” but I’m still not sure). Add to that dozens
upon dozens of minor characters that fail to distinguish themselves and a lack
of a dramatis personae reference to
aid the reader, and the Well of the
Unicorn is just a really, really hard read.

"Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other."